A cure for what ails Romney and the Republicans

AP photoHerman Cain: There was no redistributionism on this pizza man's pie chart.

Where’s Herman Cain when you need him?

The pizza magnate provided comic relief during the Republican presidential primary campaign with his "9-9-9" tax plan. At one point, he even jumped ahead of Mitt Romney in the polls.

Maybe the voters were onto something. That 9-9-9 plan had a lot of flaws. But at least Cain addressed the problem over which the Romney campaign recently came to grief.

Romney’s catching heat at the moment because of that leaked video showing him telling donors that 47 percent of the populace does not pay income tax and therefore will support Barack Obama.

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The press pilloried Romney. But there’s no disputing his point: Those who don’t pay a tax have no incentive to vote for a candidate who promises to cut it.

That all would have changed under a President Cain. Virtually every American would pay either the business transaction tax, the income tax and/or the federal sales tax, all set at a flat 9 percent.

Since everyone paid taxes, everyone would have an incentive in cutting government. A fiscally conservative Republican would have a big advantage over a big-spending Democrat at the polls.

Best of all for Republicans, the 9-9-9 plan would end redistributionism, the practice of taking money from the wealthy to subsidize those further down the income scale.

Republicans hate redistributionism, or at least they claim to. Just listen to what Romney had to say yesterday after President Obama endorsed the concept on a late-night talk show.

"I think a society based upon a government-centered nation, where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that’s the wrong course for America," Romney said.

Sounds good, but listen to what Romney said during a primary debate last October. Back then, he told Cain, "The analysis I did, person by person, is that middle-income people see higher taxes under your plan. If it’s lower for the middle class, that’s great. But that’s not what I saw."

Make up your mind, Mitt! This is a zero-sum game. Given a certain spending level, if you cut taxes on Person A, then you have to raise them on Person B.

Every intelligent Republican knows this. But these guys act like crabs in a bucket. The instant one tries to climb out, the others pull him back. In that same debate, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum was even worse.

"You’re talking about major increases in taxes on people," Santorum told Cain.

He was indeed. But if you endorse the theory that Republicans should never raise taxes on anyone ever — as the mainstream GOP candidates seem to do — then you can hardly complain about the 47 percent "who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care," as Romney put it in that video clip.

Although Cain was treated like a kook during the debates, many mainstream economists agree with his basic premise: that we would have a more robust economy if we moved away from taxing income and toward taxing consumption. A panel of economic experts assembled for the "Planet Money" show on National Public Radio — hardly a bastion of right-wing sentiment — agreed on a "common sense, no-nonsense economic plan" that ended corporate and personal income taxes and replaced them with consumption taxes.

If George W. Bush had been a bit more Machiavellian, he could have moved us in that direction. Bush could have used the 9/11 crisis to impose a big gas tax on the pretext of ending dependence on foreign oil. Such a tax could generate hundreds of billions in new revenue, a lot of it from that infamous 47 percent of Americans. That revenue could then have been used to replace revenue lost in his income tax cuts.

Alas, Bush was to Machiavelli what Godfather’s Pizza is to pizza. Bush bungled the budget and left us with huge debts that constitute the Democrats’ best argument against continuing his income tax cuts.

As for Romney, he has economic advisers who lean heavily toward consumption taxes of the sort Cain advocated. If he wins, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a President Romney pushing his own version of Cain’s plan.

But before he gets to "9-9-9," he’s got to get past 47. And that won’t be easy.